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Ladies, whether we realize it or not, we are facing a battle every day. We face battles in our homes, in our relationships, and in our cluttered hearts and distracted minds. We want a Pinterest-worthy house, flawless skin, a picture-perfect marriage, envy-inducing Instagram feeds - oh, and total control over everything that will ever happen to us. And since for most of us this is just normal life, we forget that this “normal” is actually a battlefield. One where souls are won - or lost.

Howie Wolke

Dave Foreman’s old Volkswagen bus wobbled on unbalanced tires to the northeast across the Plains of San Augustine on New Mexico Highway 12. The salsa at the Mexican restaurant in the town of Reserve had been so hot that Foreman and I were attempting—without success—to drown the fire in our mouths and bellies with large quantities of beer. Dave was driving, I was riding shotgun, and behind us, a large mass or protoplasm named Mike Roselle lay sprawled across the rear seat. Eyes glazed, half a shit-eating grin on his motionless lips, Roselle appeared to be dead, but in fact was simply stoned completely out of his gourd.

It was April 1980, and in the dry southwest spring the brown overgrazed rangeland of western New Mexico, awaiting the summer monsoon, had not yet a trace of green.

Dave was about to resign from his job as the Southwest Representative for The Wilderness Society (disagreements with a new executive director). I had recently quit my position as Wyoming Representative for Friends of the Earth, after the organization had eliminated my $60 per month funding but asked me to stay on and raise my own loot. No thanks. My guiding business was very small back then, and when I wasn’t guiding or exploring the wilds on my own, I worked as a political activist to protect wild country from the likes of the U.S. Forest Service—the very outfit that I’d once naively hoped to join as a protector of the woods.

In a process called RARE II (an acronym for the second “Roadless Area Review and Evaluation”), the Forest Service had just recommended that most of the unprotected roadless wildlands under its jurisdiction, except for a relatively few high altitude enclaves (“wilderness on the rocks”), be opened to road building, logging, mining, and other kinds of mischief incompatible with our vision of how things ought to be on the public’s land.

The thalamus (from the Greek word meaning “chamber”) is centrally located between the cerebral cortex and the midbrain and is known for its role in relaying sensory and motor signals to the cerebral cortex, and the regulation of sleep, consciousness, and alertness—rather like a hub of information flow from the senses to the cortex. It is believed the thalamus processes sensory information in addition to relaying it to the primary sensory areas and receiving feedback from the cerebral cortex. It plays major roles in the support of motor and language systems and (in connection with the hippocampus) spatial memory critical for episodic memory.

Interestingly, a common genetic variation in humans is that of the serotonin transporter 5-HTTLPR; as well, people who inherit two short alleles (SERT-ss) also have more neurons and larger volume in parts of the thalamus. The SERT-ss inheritance is linked to a greater vulnerability to depression, PTSD, and suicide. The dorsal thalamus also plays a role in the inhibition of compulsive behaviour—we will look at this more closely later on when we consider the so-called OCD loop that involves the orbitofrontal cortex, striatum, and thalamus.

The thalamus is important for sleep regulation, in particular slow-wave sleep cycles, and it also coordinates parts of the cortex as sleep changes from state to state—an orchestration that works hand-in-hand with the activity of the hippocampus during sleep.

In sum, the thalamus seems to be more than just a relay of sensory information and is integral to brain function in a cortico–thalamo–cortical pathway of processing.

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